Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones – Tactically Yours

Exhibition 23 June to 29 July, 2007

Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones

A new installation with video and audio for the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.

In Tactically Yours Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones distilled some of the close inter-personal tactics associated with a collaborative partnership into a series of actions for camera. The installation can be read as a set of exercises, testing the isolated gestures of the individual against the idea of the social or political act; and, more pointedly, the categorizations of art against the exigencies of physical action, and the flow of time.

Twenty-four CCTV monitors (in three of the Butler galleries) show a left-handed woman and a right-handed man hurling rocks along the paths and avenues within a forest. Short ‘training’ actions are repetitively looped, playing continuously, creating a field of tireless on-screen combatants. Distant traffic and birds form the backdrop to a close-up cacophony of footfalls, crunching branches, swishing coats, and exhalations. In a separate (fourth) room a video projection shows a left hand and a right hand drawing simultaneously within the one frame. In rapid, noisy bursts, thirty-two drawings appear, each immediately erased to make way for the creation of the next. The hands seem at turns cooperative, competitive, combative; the viewer may identify with the left or the right, or with some conflicted entity wrestling to integrate the work of both. As with the action in the forest, no words are exchanged. Each drawing emerges from a shower of percussive blows, audible throughout the installation.